Credit Panhandle High School with some of Art Briles' genius

Canadian head coach Chris Koetting scored Panhandle's lone touchdown in a 1984 quarterfinal game against Art Briles' Hamlin team. Briles, now head coach at Baylor, says that game was the inspiration to change to a more wide-open offense.

Baylor head coach Art Briles watches play in the second half of an NCAA college football game against Iowa State, Saturday, Oct. 19, 2013, in Waco, Texas. Baylor won 71-7.

Baylor head football coach Art Briles is the toast of college football, especially after his No. 5-ranked Bears topped Oklahooma, 41-12, Thursday night to improve to 8-0 for the first time in school history.

The Bears lead the country in total offense and scoring, and are doing it with the way Briles has done it since his days as a high school coach in Stephenville -- an unconventional spread offense that confuses and puts pressure on defenses while maximizing his own talent.

Sports Illustrated profiled Briles in an extensive feature story in this week's issue. Much of that story details when Briles got the idea to go to that kind of offense, and it was a 1984 Class 2A playoff game when he was head coach at Hamlin, northwest of Abilene.

The opponent? The Panhandle Panthers.

The game ended in a 7-7 tie, but Panhandle advanced on 20-yard penetrations, 2-1, in the days before high school teams played overtime.

What was most notable from a local point of view was the fourth quarter. Hamlin killed a punt at the Panhandle 1 on the last play of the third quarter. The Panthers then went on a 26-play mammoth drive that consumed the entire fourth quarter, got the tie-breaking penetration and advanced to the semifinals. The game ended with Panhandle on the Hamlin 11.

That game has been chronicled several times in the Globe-News. It obviously made an impression on both teams. Briles saw his team just couldn't quite match up with a bigger, more physical Panhandle team.

"As you get deeper in the playoffs, you're always going to come up against somebody that could be better than you, talentwise," Briles said. "So you need to have an advantage that gives you the opportunity to win that game."

Briles had been running the old two-back Veer offense, which he was a part of playing at the University of Houston. The next year, he used some of the Veer option principles, but did it with a one-back scheme with the quarterback in the shotgun and receivers positioned all over the field that forced a defense to announce its intentions from the beginning.

An offensive monster was created.

Here's the end of the Sports Illustrated story:

"When those Panhandle Panthers kept the ball for the entire fourth quarter, they had no idea what they had unleashed on the sport.

"(Chris) Koetting, the tiny sophomore who scored Panhandle's lone touchdown that night, has grown into a brilliant high school coach in his own right. In his four seasons as head coach at Canadian High, a school in the Texas Panhandle 100 miles from anywhere, Koetting has a 39-9 record. And what offense does he run? "We run the spread," he says. Just like Briles.